65,000 Died of Hunger in Madras While Lord Lytton Threw India the Grandest Party It Had Ever Seen

At noon on 1 January 1877, on a plain outside Delhi, the Viceroy of India took his seat on a throne. The Chief Herald read out the proclamation making Queen Victoria Empress of India, and it was read again in Urdu. The artillery fired a salute of 101 salvoes, the troops fired volleys down their lines, and the state elephants, which had stood the cannon calmly, bolted at the musketry.

Then Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the poet-diplomat Disraeli had sent to govern India, rose to speak. The results of British rule, he told the assembled princes, could be seen everywhere “in the rapid advance of the whole country, and the increasing prosperity of all its Provinces.”

Far to the south, the Madras Presidency, the British province run from what is now Chennai, was starving. William Digby, honorary secretary of the private famine relief fund in Madras, went through the death returns afterwards. While the Assemblage was being prepared and held, he found, 65,000 people in the Madras Presidency alone “died of starvation and the diseases caused by insufficient nourishment.” He reckoned another 13,000 in Mysore. Bombay’s toll was unknown, because officials there, he wrote, kept quiet about deaths.

What the empire’s party cost

The famine was no surprise to the camp at Delhi. The monsoon had failed in 1876 across the Deccan, the dry plateau of southern and western India, and the Famine Commission later put the stricken area at about 200,000 square miles holding 36 million people.

In March 1877 Lord George Hamilton, the under-secretary for India, gave the Commons the government’s estimate for the Assemblage: £65,000, of which £23,000 was troop movement already in the army budget. “A great political object,” he said, “has been attained at small cost to the State.” That is the official bill. Much larger figures circulate online, and none that we could trace rests on a document.

Digby wrote that the splendour at Delhi “surpassed anything of the kind that the continent had ever known.” Sixty-three ruling princes came. The historian Mike Davis writes of a week-long feast for 68,000 officials, princes and maharajas.

The famine council at the Delhi camp

On 5 January, with the camp still standing, Lytton called a famine council: the governors of Madras and Bombay, his own council, and Sir Richard Temple, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal. Digby records the decisive suggestion, made by Sir John Strachey, newly arrived on the Viceroy’s council. “Send Sir Richard Temple as delegate,” Strachey said. “He also understands the straitened condition of our finances, and will carry out an economical policy.” Lytton approved it on the spot.

The telegram sent from the camp to London called the Madras government’s large grain purchases “very erroneous” and promised to leave trade “unfettered.” It also reported: “One or two isolated cases of death appear to have occurred in Madras Presidency.”

Three weeks later Lytton wrote to Hamilton that “as regards the famine difficulties the Imperial assemblage has been a godsend.” He meant that it had brought the two governors to him in person. The letter survives in the history of his viceroyalty that his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, compiled from his papers in 1899, which is the source for all his letters quoted here.

High prices as “the natural saviours”

Lytton believed the grain trade would feed the south if government stayed out of its way. High prices, he wrote, “by stimulating import and limiting consumption, were the natural saviours of the situation.” The instructions Temple carried south, as Digby summarised them, were blunt: “There is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food.” Private charity was bad, they held, but “the indiscriminate charity of a Government is far worse.”

By August Lytton had written the principle into a minute: “absolute non-interference with the operations of private commercial enterprise must be the foundation of their present famine policy.” Relief meant hard labour on large public works, far from home if need be, and the hardship was deliberate. “The obligation to do a full day’s work, at a low rate of wage, and to go some distance to work,” the minute said, “keeps from seeking relief people who can support themselves otherwise.”

Meanwhile the grain went the other way. Davis counts a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat shipped to Europe in 1877 to 1878, a story told in full in the grain that left while India starved.

A pound of grain, as an experiment

Temple had been accused of extravagance for his generous relief in Bihar in 1874. In January 1877 he cut the relief wage in the Madras and Bombay camps. A man doing a full day’s hard labour got one pound of grain, about 450 grams, and one anna, a coin then worth about four pence.

He gave his reasons in words that the Indian economist R. C. Dutt quoted in 1900. “There might indeed be a question whether life cannot be sustained with one pound of grain per diem, and whether Government is bound to do more than sustain life,” Temple stated. “I myself think that one pound per diem might be sufficient to sustain life, and that the experiment ought to be tried.”

The Madras sanitary commissioner, Dr Cornish, judged the ration less than subsistence. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, a civic association in Pune, put it more plainly in one of its reports on the relief works: “A felon convicted of the worst crimes gets on an average two pounds.” Davis, using a calorie estimate by the Indian historian Sumit Guha, puts the Temple ration at 1,627 calories for heavy labour, against 1,750 at Buchenwald in 1944. The comparison is his.

“The unhappy experiment was tried,” Dutt wrote, “and abandoned after three months.”

The anti-charity law that was a joke

Anyone who reads about this famine online will meet the “Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877,” said to have made private relief donations punishable by prison. Davis presents it as a real law that Temple imposed on Madras, and it has been repeated widely since.

The text survives in the second volume of Digby’s history, and Digby prints it as a “skit.” Numbered Act XVI of 1877 and headed “An act against humanitarian practice,” it lists among the laws it repeals the Bible, the Koran and the Hindu Shastras. It was a parody, passed around in Madras by people furious with Calcutta.

What it mocked was real. After Temple’s visit, “Private charity in the town of Madras was checked, and grants in aid of donations which had been given were stopped.” In August, when a meeting at the Chief Justice’s house in Calcutta tried to start a fund for the south, it was told the Government of India was “not desirous that any action should be taken in the matter by private agency at present.” When The Times carried the story, the Lord Mayor of London, whose fund was collecting for Madras, telegraphed that the report was “Injurious.”

Confronted in Madras at the end of August, Lytton let it be telegraphed that he “entirely concurs that every facility be afforded to contributions of private charity.” The fund went on to raise more than £820,000, over twelve times the official bill for the Assemblage.

Counting the dead

The Famine Commission, appointed in May 1878 under General Richard Strachey, had two Indian members, C. Rangacharlu of Mysore and Mahadeo Wasudev Barve of Kolhapur. It estimated 5.25 million deaths above the normal rate in the British-ruled provinces in 1877 and 1878, and about two million births that never happened. That count left out the princely states, the kingdoms ruled by Indian princes under British overlordship.

Davis tabulates the higher estimates: at least 7.1 million by Ira Klein once the princely states are added, 8.2 million by the demographer Arup Maharatna, and 10.3 million by Digby, writing in 1901.

The Commission then put its numbers in context. Taking thirty years of famines together and weighing them against the growth of the population, it concluded that their effect was “much less important than might at first sight have been supposed.” It also rejected the idea that the poor had a right to relief in a famine, warning that it would lead to “a system of general poor relief, which we cannot contemplate without serious apprehension.” Sixty-five years later, under the same Raj, Bengal starved in 1943.

A press law passed in one sitting

In March 1878 Lytton turned on the Indian-language newspapers. He telegraphed London asking leave to pass a press bill “at a single sitting on the plea of urgency, which is not fictitious,” adding that it “will probably be accepted with far less objection than if it had formed subject of previous discussion.” London agreed the next morning. The Vernacular Press Act became law on 14 March.

Magistrates could demand bonds from publishers of papers in Indian languages and, after one warning, seize their presses, and no court could review any of it. English papers were exempt. It was now, Gladstone told the Commons, “perfectly allowable for any man to publish in English an article, which article, when translated into one of the Native tongues, may draw down upon the head of the publisher the resentment of the Government.”

The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Bengali weekly, turned itself into an English paper and stepped out of the Act’s reach. In September more than a thousand people filled Calcutta’s Town Hall for the Indian Association’s second meeting against the law. Lytton’s successor, Lord Ripon, repealed it.

The same month as the press law, the Indian Arms Act barred anyone from going “armed with any arms except under a license,” and let the government exempt “any class of persons” it chose by notification.

The war the famine fund paid for

In his Durbar speech Lytton had said the Empress relied for her Indian empire “not upon the conquest of weaker States, or the annexation of neighbouring territories.” In September 1878 he sent a mission towards Kabul. When it was turned back at the Khyber Pass, three British columns of 40,000 men invaded Afghanistan in November. The British resident’s whole party of about 200 was killed in Kabul in September 1879, and a British-Indian force was overwhelmed at Maiwand in July 1880. Lytton resigned that year.

His defenders have a real argument, and his daughter’s history makes it plainly: relief on the generous 1874 scale, applied to a famine this size, “would have brought speedy bankruptcy.” Britannica’s entry still credits him with “effective measures for famine relief.”

Lytton’s government had answered the famine with new taxes and a Famine Insurance Grant, a sum of one and a half crore rupees a year set aside, Dutt records, under a pledge that the money would go to no other purpose. In August 1881 the Secretary of State for India, Lord Hartington, told the Commons that the Afghan war had cost £23 million. Britain’s Treasury put in £5 million. India’s own revenue surpluses and cash balances covered most of the rest, along with one more item. “The balances of the Famine Insurance, amounting to £4,035,309,” Hartington said, “have been likewise appropriated to that object.”